The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Henkin
Joshua Henkin’s new, forceful novel, The World Without You, draws some of its power from this peculiar disconnect between the personal and the national.
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Reese Okyong Kwon
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Reese Okyong Kwon's writing is published or forthcoming in the Believer, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony, and was named one of Narrative's "30 Below 30" writers. She can be found at www.reesekwon.com.
The Rumpus Interview with Michael David Lukas
At first, I thought he was going to be a pornographer. I’d received a scholarship to attend a writers’ conference in Napa Valley and had a cheap flight to San…
THE BLURB #15: The Monster Impulse
The panic that pervades these stories arises because in our real, human world there is too much cause for fear and worry. Who, exactly, is responsible for the deteriorating environment? What, precisely, causes terrorism? Enter the bugbears and scapegoats.
From the Department of Possibly Lost But Nevertheless Immensely Worthwhile Causes
In all the understandable uproar about the impending disembowelment of the literary magazine TriQuarterly, I haven’t yet seen a suggestion that readers and writers try to do something about the…
King James and the Battle for the Novel
There’s a sizable new interview with James Wood, polemical literary critic extraordinaire, up on LA Weekly. Colson Whitehead has spoofed him, Walter Kirn has mocked him, and there’s even a…
STORIES WE RECOMMEND: “Andy Catlett: Early Education”
I’ve been living in the Bay Area for nine months now, but after years in New York City I still feel like an exile here. Strangers’ smiles unnerve me; hikes,…
Reese Kwon: The Last Book I Loved, The Modern Element
Sometimes I separate the books I intend, one day, to read, into two groups: the Bookcase of Desire, and the Bookcase of Guilt. Desire is made up of anticipated pleasures,…
Television, Starring John Cheever and John Updike
This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and…
Mortals—Norman Rush’s Novel For Grown-ups
If I have learned anything from years of recommending this book, it’s this: enthusiasm, by itself, accomplishes nothing.